


blame it on the summer heat

by Naladot



Category: Life with Derek
Genre: College, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-04 20:56:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5348255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/Naladot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“Case,” Derek says suddenly. “Wanna start a band?”</i> The summer where everything buried comes to the surface.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blame it on the summer heat

**Author's Note:**

> Came back to this fandom after a long time. This is set toward the end of their college years, sort of canon.

The thick heat of summer blankets them even after the sun has mostly disappeared from the sky, but Casey stays outside because it’s quieter in the yard than it is inside where the television competes with the baby in an endless battle to deafen everyone else in the house. For the same reason, Derek has brought his guitar outside and sits in the lawn chair next to hers, plucking out a wandering tune. The mosquitoes will be out soon. Casey watches lights turn on in the houses next to them, glowing over the fence and into their rectangle of private, grassy suburbia.

“Case,” Derek says suddenly. He shifts, causing the lawn chair to let out a weary squeak, and Casey looks at him. “Wanna start a band?”

Casey snorts. “You have a band, Derek,” she points out. She arches an eyebrow and he rolls his eyes, settling back into the chair and looking at her like she’s said the dumbest thing in the world. She bites back the urge to insult him before he insults her. They’ve gotten better at civility, since they went to college.

“I know _that_ ,” he says. “But if you and I started a band, it could be like, a schtick. A sister-and-brother folk duo thing. You could sing folksy-hipster shit, couldn’t you?” He grins like it’s the best idea he’s ever thought of, a fantasy of indie fame reflected in his eyes. 

Casey really looks at him for the first time in a while. He dresses like the same people he’s making fun of, his quirky vintage clothing dampened a little with sweat. She can see the tattoo on the underside of his arm peeking out from beneath the sleeve of his shirt, some rolling Latin script that she’s never bothered to ask about. He has more, on his other arm. It occurs to her that he could have other tattoos hidden beneath his clothes, skin she’s never seen. George was both horrified and amused the first time Derek came home looking like he’d spent the whole summer bouncing from concert to rave to house party. Casey’s mother hadn’t done much more than shrug. Casey lectured him, she remembers now. _Don’t throw your whole life away._

“Sure,” Casey laughs. “What are we supposed to sing about, though? Life in the suburbs? That doesn’t seem pretentious enough.” She grins back at him. Even in the low light, she can see Derek falter a little, then laugh. Neither of them are used to getting along.

“You could sing about me,” Derek teases. He starts strumming a new tune, making up nonsensical lyrics about being the greatest artist the world has ever seen. Casey rolls her eyes and looks away again, instead watching the dark shape of a cat slinking along the line of their fence.

Back then, she’d told Derek not to throw his life away, and yet all her best-laid plans for her own life had crumbled apart just the same. Since January, she’d been scheduled for a summer internship with an international PR firm. Her father had made the connection for her. It fell through a month before the semester ended, and she scrambled to find something else, but failed. Her boyfriend dumped her just before he graduated, claiming they “were heading different directions,” but Casey knew that he was really just afraid of staying together so long they’d end up getting married. She cried for two days, then left her dorm room, and refused to think about him again. Then her grandmother passed away. And so following the funeral Casey came home for the summer, with the vague intention of perfecting her resume and doing volunteer work to boost her extracurriculars. Sitting in the backyard, though, she realizes for the first time that she’s tired. Exhausted all the way into her bones.

“What’s wrong with your current band, Derek?” she asks when his song devolves into him randomly rhyming words. “I thought you had, and I quote, ‘a show booked almost every night of the summer.’”

He shrugs. “We do.” He looks up and smiles, sticks a finger out and pushes it against her cheek. “Maybe I want some more quality family time.”

“Oh, shut up,” Casey says, shoving his hand away. He goes back to his guitar, still smiling to himself. It’s been a while since he invaded her space like that. She wonders why she even notices, that it’s been a while.

“Think about it,” he says, lifting his eyebrows and getting up out of the lawn chair. It emits another loud squeak, sounding every bit like a sigh of relief. Derek kicks it for good measure. “I think we’d be a real hit.”

He goes back inside, letting the screen door clap against the frame.

“Well,” Casey says into the dark. “None of my other plans are working out.”

 

 

She goes to his show on the weekend. His band is playing for a local bar’s summer patio nights, and Casey is surprised to see so many people clumped around the assortment of tables. They’re cheering for another band that’s just finishing their set. She pushes her way toward the front of the crowd, catching the end of the song, just as the pianist goes for the big note. He’s handsome, clean-cut, a little on the thin side—the kind of guy young Casey, pre-Max Casey, would have dreamed up for herself. She keeps her eyes on him as he casts a mournful look around the crowd, and then he breaks out into a smile. He’s handsome, all right. Maybe she’ll get Derek to introduce her after the show.

Derek and his band come up after the other band clears out. She hasn’t seen their new line-up—hadn’t really known the old one, actually—because she was far too busy the past two years maintaining a 4.0 to sleep, much less go to Derek’s shows. She recognizes one of the guys from her upper division classes, another as Derek’s roommate, but the rest she’s never seen before. Derek steps up to the microphone and grins.

“I see those looks on your faces,” he laughs, pointing into the crowd. “You’re going, ‘oh, man, _college kids?_ Seriously?’” Something shifts in his eyes and for the first time Casey realizes, _Derek can do anything when he really puts his mind to it._

Derek laughs again. “That’s okay for us,” he tells the crowd. “No expectations means you’re all going to be pleasantly surprised.”

She’s so startled by her Derek-related revelation that she doesn’t even hear the first third of the song. The enthusiastic head-bobs of the thirty-something men at the table next to her serve as her reminder to tune back in, and when she does, she is, in fact, pleasantly surprised. Maybe Derek has always been this way, and she just never noticed. “Playing good music” has never ranked very highly on her list of criteria for success.

She actually gets into the music, letting the melody wash over her along with the warm night breeze, the sounds of people laughing, the soft yellow lights glowing around the patio. She wonders what made Derek and his band want to play at a place like this. It’s relatively tame, totally relaxed. But when she looks at Derek again, his eyes are luminous, like he’s having the time of his life.

He brings her a drink after they finish, sidling up beside her before she realizes he’s back outside. “What are you doing here?” he asks, his words blunt and forceful. Casey thinks about how he looked when he was playing, and manages to bite her tongue.

“I didn’t have anything else to do,” she says, taking the drink out of his hand. Her fingers slide over his in the exchange, and she watches him wipe his hand against his jeans. It gives her an odd, misplaced pause, before she continues. “Besides, if I’m stealing you away from your band, I figured I should see the competition first.”

It takes him a minute to process that, like he’s searching for an insult. But Casey really hadn’t meant one. Then he laughs, his voice shaky.

“I bet you hated it,” he says. “Bet you didn’t even own up having a brother in the band.”

“You’re not my brother,” Casey says automatically, and there’s a half-second pause where she swears she sees the luminosity return to his eyes, but then he just looks amused. “And actually—you all were good. Really good.”

“I know,” he says, puffing up his chest. “Glad you’ve developed good taste after all these years, Case.”

Casey rolls her eyes and sips on the drink. “I haven’t changed. You got better.”

She wants to ask what he’s doing back at home this summer, why he picked out shows like this, but she knows his answer—to save money. She just doesn’t like that answer anymore. Because something’s changed with him, for him to look so content on stage, so happy where he is. She wants to know what happened over the last few years but it feels like too serious a conversation for the two of them to have, so she doesn’t ask. Instead she lets him introduce her to the band. (He says, “This is Casey,” and nothing else. Casey doesn’t offer more details.) They stick around until midnight, laughing with the guys. 

Then they go home, Casey following the red lights of the back of his car the whole way. It’s only when they get home that she realizes she forgot to ask about the soulful pianist from the band before his.

 

 

As the summer moves forward, one week turning into one month, Casey dutifully fills up her time with volunteer hours in different locations around the community, more out of habit than a real sense of purpose. She does enjoy her time at the library reading to neighborhood kids, and playing chess with a lovely gentleman at a local nursing home, and job shadowing one of the community development planners. But she lacks that internal, burning passion to get out and _do things,_ be somebody, make changes happen. She goes home in the evenings and collapses on the couch with a book, turning the pages and absorbing very little. She’ll graduate next year. She was supposed to have everything figured out by now.

They still eat together as a family, maybe once a week, although Lizzie is gone for the summer as a camp counselor and Edwin works most evenings. Derek, when he’s at home, spends most of his time teasing Marti and making their baby brother laugh. Casey watches them, reminded all over again that Derek has become a stranger. She claims him as family but she doesn’t know him anymore, not really, and this unsettles her, although she doesn’t know why.

She’s in Lizzie’s room for the summer, her old room having been changed into the baby’s room. Derek’s room was turned into a TV den, but he sleeps happily on the futon. Casey retreats into Lizzie’s room after dinner and hears the droning buzz of some reality program coming from behind the closed door of Derek’s room. It all feels familiar, and she has an urge to burst in and yell at him for _something,_ but she doesn’t. She lies down on Lizzie’s bed instead and picks up her book, a YA adventure novel she’d chosen solely because the middle school boy she tutors at the library had called it “the most awesome book _ever_ ” and Casey has to know if it lives up to the hype.

After a few minutes, the door to the room bangs open and Derek fills up the frame, giving Casey an exasperated look that is so familiar her heart clenches up like it’s trying to shrivel away from him. “What?” she demands.

Derek gestures wildly. “Let’s go ahead and get it over with. Come on, Case.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Something’s wrong with you,” Derek says as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “And eventually you’re going to make me listen to you spew out all your problems, and I’m going to have to help you make pros and cons lists and whatever, so seriously, let’s just go ahead and get started.”

Casey blinks up at him, utterly confused. “Nothing’s wrong,” she tells him. At least, nothing she can articulate—nothing she wants to try to articulate. And not to Derek. They’re not friends, and they’re not siblings. If she made him her sounding board in the past—well, that’s over now.

“Casey,” Derek says. He flops down onto the end of the bed, pushing her legs to the side. “I’ve been your reluctant counselor and cohabitator for _years_ —”

“I don’t think cohabitator is a real word.”

“— _and_ I’m fluent in Casey, unfortunately. I have to drive two hours for our show tomorrow, so I’d like it if we got the freak-out session over with sooner rather than later.”

“Derek,” Casey says patiently, “Nothing. Is. Wrong. Okay? Since when do you care, anyway?”

“Since I know it’s going to interrupt my sleep!” Derek groans. He grabs her wrist, standing and pulling her sideways on the bed. “Let’s, I don’t know, go for a mind-cleansing walk, or whatever weird terms you have for dealing with yourself.”

Casey has half a mind to tell Derek to shove off, but his grip on her wrist is firm and oddly reassuring, and all of a sudden, she doesn’t want to be alone. So she gets up and puts on her shoes and follows Derek out the front door.

He walks a half-step in front of her for a block until he groans, grabs onto her elbow, and pulls her up to walk beside him. He lets go of her elbow but they’re still walking close, jostling together every few steps, until Casey finally moves away. It’s too hot to be so close to one another, she reasons.

They end up at a park twenty minutes from their house. It’s empty—too late for kids, but too early for druggies—and Derek scrambles to the top of the gym, perching right at the top of the dome. Casey climbs up beside him and sits herself back against the metal bars, tilting her head back to look at the dusky night sky. She can hear the familiar rhythm of his breathing next to her, and goosebumps raise on her arms.

“All right, Casey,” Derek says. “We’re here. It’s picturesque _and_ nostalgic, all at once. I know you’re dying to dump all your thoughts. You have exactly a half-hour before I cut you off.”

“So generous,” Casey deadpans. She tilts her head to the side to get a good look at him and finds him wearing a crooked smile, his expression otherwise unreadable in the semi-dark. He shifts and taps his foot against her thigh.

“Time’s wasting,” he says.

“Nothing’s _wrong,_ Derek. Hate to disappoint you.”

“Are you telling me that Casey McDonald is well-adjusted and content with her life? Because there’s no way in hell I’m falling for _that._ ”

“Life is full of surprises.”

He reaches out and grabs her shoulder and she jumps. “Who _are_ you?” he demands. “Where’s the high-pitched squealing? The ridiculous crisis? The crying?”

“I don’t cry,” Casey retorts, and jerks her shoulder away. His hand is too warm. “And—okay, _fine,_ I’ll tell you what’s on my mind.”

“Finally.” Derek leans back with his elbows propped on one of the metal bars and looks at her expectantly.

“Nothing’s wrong, though,” Casey continues. She looks at the line of trees edging the park instead of at him, because it feels safer, somehow. “It’s just—I’ve made so many plans, you know? Really good, well-thought out, careful plans. Goals that I knew I could achieve if I worked hard enough, and the thing is I _did_ work hard enough. I did every single step perfectly and what happened? Here I am with no internship, no boyfriend, no job, and no idea of what I want to do anymore.” She pauses and chances a glance back at him. “If you’d come to talk to me like, a month ago, then you could have enjoyed ‘Casey’s existential crisis of the year’ like you want to. But now I just—I’m tired of it. I don’t know what I want. I’m just watching everything fall apart.”

Derek is quiet for a long moment. She can see the lines of a frown in the dark, and the script of his tattoo on his arm, but otherwise he is shadowed by the dusk. “You’re not falling apart, Casey,” he says finally, his voice quiet and subdued. “You’ll never know what it’s like to be a failure.”

Casey turns that over in her mind for a moment. No one in their family thought of Derek as successful—but calling him a failure was something else entirely. But still. “I guess it’s a matter of expectations,” she says. “I feel like a failure because I can’t achieve what I set out for myself.”

“Does it matter?” Derek’s voice is soft. A breeze picks up Casey’s hair off her neck and she shivers, and looks away.

“I don’t know.”

A long silence spreads between them as the dusk bleeds into night, stars pricking the sky above them, lights coming on in the houses surrounding them. She sits as quietly as possible, waiting for Derek to say something, almost wishing he would pick a fight. The silence is unbearably heavy. It’s as though she and Derek are the only two people in the world at that moment, like they’ve slipped out of time and space into this private universe of their own. The odd feeling of intimacy terrifies her.

“Wanna spill your guts, too?” Casey jokes, putting on a falsely teasing voice.

Most of his face is obscured in the dark but his eyes reflect the light of the street lamps flickering around the park and she can see him stare at her for a moment too long. And then another beat, time stumbles forward, and they’re waiting. Casey doesn’t dare breathe, no matter how her lungs start to burn.

“Nah,” Derek says, snapping the moment apart. Casey sucks in air with a sense of relief. 

Derek keeps talking. “I really _am_ well-adjusted and I don’t need you to play shrink.” His heart isn’t in it, though. Casey knows the difference between Derek being mean because he feels mean, and Derek being mean to hold people off. She just doesn’t know what he’s protecting, this time.

They walk back in silence. Derek walks a half-step in front of her the whole way, and neither of them make any attempt to change this.

 

 

Derek spends less time in the house in the week that follows. His presence lingers in the spaces he’s vacated—the scent of cologne in the bathroom, the milk left out on the counter that Casey puts away with a roll of her eyes, the sound of the lawnmower early in the morning and the empty yard when she finally gets out of bed. Everything seems topsy-turvy, more than it used to. Their parents take Edwin and Marti and the baby to camp, leaving the house empty, and Casey uneasy. It doesn’t feel like a surprise when she finds a flyer for Derek’s next concert taped to the novel she left on Lizzy’s nightstand.

The show is at a club half an hour away, and she makes plans to catch a ride with Ralph and Sam, whom she’d almost forgotten were back in town until she sees a notification pop up on her Facebook feed. She plans her outfit for the night a little more carefully than the event warrants. Dark jeans, black crop top. She wants to play dress-up and pretend to be somebody else for the night, because it’s summer, because she’s tired. Because she can.

“Damn, Casey,” Ralph says when they drive up to the house. Casey climbs into the backseat of the car and looks at Sam’s grin in the rearview mirror. _Remember when,_ he seems to be saying. Casey can’t remember anymore, who she was back then.

“Who’re you showing off for?” Sam asks.

“The old high school crowd, obviously,” Casey jokes. “I’m going for that nerd-turns-hot movie plot. Do you think I pull it off?”

“You were hot in high school, though,” Ralph laughs. Casey snorts and rolls her eyes, looks out the window at the suburbs passing by.

The club crackles with activity, electric energy from the bass thrumming through the floor, into Casey’s chest. She buys beers for herself and the guys, who cheer her praises until Derek’s band takes the stage. Casey knows he’s on stage before the music starts, some magnetic force dragging her eyes up to the stage where Derek stands, beaming at the crowd. The drummer counts down, and the music starts.

It doesn’t take Casey long to get drunk, because she’s always been a lightweight (Derek’s always been embarrassed by her) and a couple of guys offer to buy her drinks one after the other. Casey dances with them just long enough to disappear gracefully into the crowd, the buzz in her head marching in time with the beat of the drums. Derek’s singing reverberates in her head, _You’re making me crazy._ Isn’t that the truth.

She doesn’t quite remember how she ends up backstage after the show, laughing with the bass player and the drummer. She doesn’t quite remember how she ends up in the passenger seat of Derek’s car, either, but it all smells familiar and comforting, and it’s so easy to drift off to sleep.

She wakes up to Derek shaking her shoulder, and blinks until she realizes that what’s beyond the windshield is the garage.

“Come on, Sleeping Beauty,” Derek groans. “I hate to break it to you, but I can’t actually carry you into the house. I’m not calling you fat, okay, I’m saying I’m not as strong as I look.”

Somewhere in the back of her fuzzy brain, Casey has a good retort to that. But she lets the moment drift out of her grasp and slowly gets out of the car. She’s not so drunk, but still drowsy, and she floats inside as if in a dream. It still feels like a dream when Derek’s arm slides around her waist and guides her through the empty house, up the stairs, into Lizzy’s room, where he lets her slump down onto the bed. 

In the semi-dark she can focus only on his luminous eyes. He sits beside her for too long. He’s too still.

Casey’s faculties of reason still aren’t working properly and she lets out words before her brain can process them, consequences be damned. “Do you want to kiss me?” she asks him.

Silence. Both of them frozen, trying not to breathe. Casey’s not as drunk as she seems and she’s sobering up quickly, now, but she wants the plausible deniability. He’s close enough to kiss her, and she can already feel his breath ghosting over her skin, the sensation of a kiss like a divination of the future. He will do it, wants to do it. She wants him to.

But then he’s moving away, leaving the room. The door closes with a light click behind him, and Casey has half a mind to call out his name—an irritated Der- _ek_ —but she doesn’t, because that’s not right anymore. Everything has shifted out of place, and the silence that sets in now is emptier and more sober than what filled the room before. She’s hurt Derek very badly somehow. She doesn’t even know how. Or she knows, but can’t look directly at the reason, not yet.

 

 

The next day, the emptiness of the house looms even larger than it did before. Casey goes downstairs and finds Derek sitting on the couch, remote in his hand while he watches something on the television. When she looks, it’s a show for preschoolers with bright colors and baby voices, and Derek hasn’t seemed to notice yet. He doesn’t move, or acknowledge her in any way, and Casey decides that maybe it is better for her to ignore him, too. She goes into the kitchen and stands by the window over the sink, looking out at the sun-filled backyard. If only she’d been drunk enough to forget.

She imagines what she’d say to him, if she thought they could stomach talking to each other right now. She’d say “physical attraction is biological” and “we can’t help our biology” and also “nothing happened.” She’d say “we’re not really related.” She wouldn’t mention how a feeling blooms inside her already—the terrible intuition that she wants, has always wanted, this thing she cannot name nor acknowledge (he should have kissed her when they had the chance). She would say “we can’t deny biology so it’s better to acknowledge what happened and move on.” She wouldn’t talk about how the unfilled promise, the unfulfilled expectation of a kiss, has started to corrode her common sense.

She’s too aware of him sitting in silence in the other room. It’s like they’re listening to each other. Waiting.

She walks back into the other room. “I’m going to go out for coffee. Wanna come?” she asks brightly. He winces.

“You’re too chipper for someone who’s supposed to be hung over,” he says. He doesn’t look at her, and he’s still watching the program for preschoolers. She watches as he blinks at the screen, shakes himself, and changes the channel.

“Well, let me know if you want me to get you anything,” she continues, still too bright. Derek doesn’t say anything. Casey turns and heads up the stairs, repeating the mantra _crazy crazy crazy_ in her head.

In the bathroom, she looks at herself in the mirror. “Just biology,” she informs her reflection. “Sometimes science gets the best of you. Nothing to worry about.”

Even her reflection doesn’t look convinced.

 

 

Their parents return and suddenly Casey feels like the house is too crowded. Everywhere she goes, Derek is already there—at the dining room table eating breakfast, sitting on the couch to watch television with Edwin, outside on the back porch plucking the strings of his guitar. They’re too civil to one another for Casey’s comfort, polite “excuse me’s” and “thank you’s” exchanged too often. Even Casey’s mom notices the difference: “Did you two get in a fight?”

“No,” Casey says automatically, pushing past her to grab a soda from the refrigerator. “What gives you that idea?”

“You’re being so—nice to each other,” her mom replies carefully, like she’s testing the waters.

“We’re not teenagers any more,” Casey tells her. She musters up all her courage and turns around with a nearly-sincere smile. “Why shouldn’t we be nice to each other?”

“Well, it’s _weird,_ ” her mom answers. “But, peaceful, I guess.”

Casey takes that as the end of the conversation and steps outside the house. Her parents brought with them the stifling heat of summer and she lets the warm air press against her skin, weighing her down. The sun is shining hot on the backyard, and the neighbor’s cat has jumped into their yard to hide in the shade cast by the fence. She doesn’t notice Derek until he speaks.

“Hey, can I have a sip of that?”

She jumps nearly a foot in the air. Derek is sitting in the creaky lawn chair, but he pushed it right up against the side of the house to sit in the shade, so she wasn’t able to see him. She stares at him, bug-eyed.

“Chill out, Case.” Derek holds out his hand and she hands him the soda without thinking about it, then grabs the other lawn chair and sits down next to him. They might as well reestablish a status quo. He guzzles down the soda and she elbows him once, then again.

“What?” he cries out. Casey wordlessly gestures for the soda can and just as he moves to hand it back, he stops and grabs hold of her wrist. “What’s this?” he asks, turning her arm so that the pale, soft underside of her arm is exposed to the sun.

Casey forgot that the night before, she’d doodled on her wrist—just a small feather, something she saw on the internet and thought was pretty. “It made me think of freedom,” she says, her voice softer than she meant it to be. “Freedom from responsibilities, I guess.”

The pad of his thumb shivers across the drawing. 

“Of course you’d pick something so pretentious,” he sneers, but his heart isn’t in it. His thumb presses against her wrist, rubbing the ink off her skin, and her pulse throbs against the pressure. 

So many things they’re not saying, but Casey doesn’t think she could put words to them if she tried. Plausible deniability. She swallows and finds her mouth is dry, so she swipes for the soda can. The moment shatters.

“You’ve never asked about my tattoos,” Derek says, his voice hollow. He laughs, and pushes up the sleeve of his shirt. The Latin script curls around the underside of his arm and she catches the color of another tattoo beyond that, but he points to the words. “ _Qui audet adipiscitur._ Who dares, wins.”

“And you call me pretentious,” Casey scoffs. She wants to see the rest of his tattoos. The image of pushing up his sleeve—pushing up his shirt—in search of the rest suddenly flashes across her brain. She shuts the thought down just as quickly. Can’t help hormones. Can’t help biology.

“The difference is, I can actually pull it off.” Derek winks at her and pushes his shirt sleeve back down. Casey lets out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

“Yeah? Says who?”

“Says everyone. If I do it, it’s part of my whole persona. If you do it, it’s like you’re trying to be edgy, but you can’t commit.”

“I could commit to being edgy if I wanted to!”

Derek arches an eyebrow and gives her a look. He’s amused. Casey sinks back in her chair.

“But you’re right, I don’t want to. Anyway,” she scrunches up her nose. “I don’t want a tattoo. I’m scared of needles.”

“It’s not that bad,” Derek says. “Just a little bit of pain—but it’s worth it for the result.”

“If only you applied that same resolve to your grades.”

“Hey, now, my GPA is great. Not everyone _needs_ a four-point-oh, Case.”

“Whatever.” She doesn’t have a better comeback. But this weird equilibrium—where they’re friends, sort of, but not talking about whatever it is tremoring between them—leaves her too tired for verbal sparring. “Anyway, it doesn’t count for much, I guess. Not if I can’t figure out what I wanted it for in the first place.”

“You wanted it because you thought that you needed it,” Derek says simply.

“Yeah, but what now? What if everything I thought was a done deal, actually isn’t?”

“You’ll figure it out.” He sounds so confident that Casey can almost believe him—wants to believe him, and to keep hearing him speak with so much confidence about her, because it sounds better and more truthful coming from Derek than from anybody else.

“Yeah well,” Casey says, “Truth is, I’m scared.”

She looks at him and he looks at her and she isn’t entirely sure what it is she’s scared of. She can hear her heart beating in her ears. She wants Derek to look away, because if this is a challenge, she won’t be the one to break first.

“You invent things to be scared of, you know,” Derek says. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else, but then he stands up out of the chair. “It’s hot,” he says by way of explanation, and goes back inside. Casey listens to the screen door clap closed and sips on her soda. He’s probably right. She hates it when he’s right.

 

 

Late at night she goes downstairs for something to drink and Derek is standing in the kitchen, looking out the window. They’ve been here before. Done this before. Neither of them says a word as Casey brushes by him to get to the refrigerator, but she can feel him watching her, like he wants to say something but won’t. The silence is more full of words than anything they could voice; Casey focuses on the difficult task of pouring a glass of water. She can’t help her own hormones, she reminds herself. Chemical reactions bouncing through the air, messing with her head. It’s not logical. Just biological. She doesn’t even realize how hard her heart is beating until Derek’s arm appears in her peripheral vision as he puts his own glass in the sink. This is something to be scared of. She’s not inventing this.

 

 

She avoids Derek as best as she can for the rest of the week, because a chemical reaction can be stopped by removing the agent (or something; Casey’s specialty wasn’t science). She hears him strumming his guitar each night and finds herself wishing they _could_ become a traveling folk duo. Escape everything that trapped them here and roam wherever they wanted to go. She dreams about him, too—odd dreams that don’t follow a coherent plot, except that Derek is always there, saying nothing when she expected him to go on sparring with her forever. Her world was safer when they were fighting. In the absence of fighting, Casey has too much space to think.

She ends up at his show, same patio bar as the beginning of the summer. He and his band play new songs and the little crowd applauds with delight. Casey stays at the back, this time, holding her tongue. Thinking is dangerous. Too much thinking is what got her here.

As usual, Derek is the last of the band to load up his instrument and gear in his car, so he’s alone in the parking lot behind the bar when she approaches him.

“Think you can give me a ride?” She quirks a smile and pretends like she’s joking.

Derek looks around, his eyes widening when he sees her. “What are you doing here?”

“I told you, your music got better. Have room for a passenger, or are you going to make me walk?”

He hesitates. She can’t read the expression in his eyes at all, but the unknown gives her a selfish little thrill that she can’t think about because she won’t like what it means. The streetlamp overhead casts odd shadows on his face, under his eyes as he looks at her, like he’s trying to figure her out the way she’s trying to do the same with him.

“Is there a rule that you have to give your sister a ride?” he asks.

“I’m not your sister,” Casey interjects quickly. Too quickly. They both wince.

Derek kicks a foot against the tire of his car. His hands are shoved into his pockets, his shoulders slumped a little, a defeated picture Casey doesn’t like at all. But she’s pretty sure she looks the same, right now.

“Listen, Casey,” Derek says, addressing the trunk of his car instead of her. “Maybe—maybe you should take the car, and I’ll walk.”

“Who the hell are you, and what have you done with Derek Venturi?” Casey asks.

When he looks up at her, posture suddenly tense and a fight in his eyes, Casey knows she’s made a decision before she had a chance to think. Maybe that’s better. Maybe that’s the only way.

She launches herself forward and catches herself with her hands against his face. Then she kisses him.

There’s a split second pause while they both freeze. Casey’s brain clicks forward slowly, unable to process what she’s done. But her biology works of its own accord, taking over the functions of her body, chasing after the longing her brain ignored. She pushes forward, begging to be acknowledged. Derek catches up a moment later, pulling her around the waist, deepening the kiss, the slide of their lips too much hormones and too little common sense.

As if their brains are in sync, they jump away from each other at the same moment. Casey’s pulse is racing and Derek stares at her with wide, crazed eyes.

“Um,” he says.

“Hormones,” Casey answers. “Biology.”

Derek nods frantically. “Yes. That.”

“Right.”

“Accident,” Derek continues.

“Aberration,” Casey offers.

“I don’t know what that word means, but, yeah, sure.”

“Let’s—go home?” Casey asks. The thought of home is uncomfortable, but at least it’s safe. The boundaries are clearly delineated. No way of knowing what will happen if they stay out here.

“Yeah.”

Casey turns away and moves toward the passenger car door. Her hands are shaking. She doesn’t notice until she goes to open the door and then she realizes how badly she’s shaking and everything seems all the more strange, just because of that.

“Casey?”

Before she can even finish turning around, he’s kissing her again. 

 

 

They’re still high on the heady indulgence of kissing when Casey finally climbs into the car and Derek circles around to the other side. He gets into the driver’s seat and Casey reaches for him again, pressing fast kisses against his mouth like they don’t have enough time (it feels like they don’t have enough time). She only stops to let him put the key in the ignition because a group of people comes into the parking lot from the bar, laughing loudly, and even though Casey has no idea who they are in the back of her mind a warning bell is ringing, _don’t get caught._

“Don’t go home,” she instructs as soon as Derek shifts the car into drive.

“Where do you want to go?” he asks. He sounds a little breathless and her heartbeat falters for a second, then races forward.

“I don’t care. Just don’t go home.”

She’s barely aware of the streets passing by. Her every nerve is electric, focused on Derek next to her, the lingering feeling of his mouth against hers. When he parks the car, she starts to reach for him again, but then she notices the neon sign glowing on the building in front of them.

“Hold on. Tattoo parlor?”

Derek grins. “Might as well, while you’re being reckless.” He leans forward and kisses her. A deep kiss that goes on too long. He breaks away and Casey is intoxicated enough to get out of the car and follow him inside. 

“Hey, Blake,” Derek says to the guy sitting at the front desk inside. Casey casts her eyes around the room, looking at the drawings covering the walls. “She wants to put one of those feathers on her wrist. I’m paying.”

“I want _what?_ ” Casey cries. But Derek puts his arm around her waist and grins at her, and suddenly Casey doesn’t have it in her to protest. She nods wordlessly as Derek flips through a book of tattoo designs, chatting amiably with the guy at the counter, and finally assents to a delicate looking feather at the top of one of the pages. Next thing she knows she’s sitting in a chair with her right arm stretched out in front of her and her left hand gripping Derek’s.

“ _Ow,_ Casey, are you trying to break my hand?”

“I—hate—needles!” Casey hisses through her teeth. She screws her eyes up tight and grits her teeth while the needle presses into her skin. To Derek’s credit, he doesn’t pull his hand away from her grasp until the tattoo is finished. Casey keeps her eyes closed, too afraid to look.

“Wow,” Derek says. “ _Property of Derek Venturi._ Nice.”

“ _What?_ ” Casey yelps. She opens her eyes and frantically searches her wrist for the tattoo from hell. Instead, she sees the delicate feather she’d asked for. Derek howls with laughter next to her. She slaps him on his arm, suppressing the smile twitching on her lips.

She’s still in a daze when they leave the tattoo parlor and step back outside into the warm night. The haze of city lights obscures the stars, but she can see some of them pricking the sky overhead, and she looks up for a moment, focusing on those instead of the sting on her wrist. The permanent reminder that everything has changed, this night, this summer. She lets her eyes drop from the sky and finds that Derek is in front of her, watching her, waiting.

Casey clears her throat and draws her shoulders back. “We should talk about this.”

Derek throws his head back and groans. “Or we could _not_ —”

“Der- _ek!_ We just made out! A lot! We have to talk about this!”

“Why?” Derek sighs, still looking up at the sky.

“Why? Because this changes _everything_ —”

Derek gives her a look, his gaze full and steady. “Casey. What does it really change?”

Casey hugs her arms around herself, the bandage on her tattoo rubbing against her opposite arm. She shifts her weight between her feet and looks for an easy out to his question, but there isn’t one. She knows there isn’t one.

“Well,” she says softly. “There’s no more plausible deniability.”

He stands there with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, the slightest frown crossing his lips. Casey’s wrist aches and she thinks vaguely of how appalled she’ll be later when she realizes she got a tattoo on a whim, but there’s something about the soft promise of freedom inked into her skin that gives her a little comfort. Maybe it’ll turn out okay. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much, if nothing turns out the way she planned.

Derek closes the distance between them and wraps his arms around her. It’s awkward for a moment, both of them standing too stiffly, afraid to relax. This is more intimate before, somehow, and Casey realizes that the defenses of _hormones_ and _biology_ aren’t going to hold up very well against this. But she melts into him, anyway. And breathes.

“So,” she says into his chest. “What now?”

Derek is quiet for a moment and she slides her arms around his waist. Maybe they’re still crazy. (Maybe all his songs were about her, in the first place.)

Derek leans back and she looks up to see him grinning.

“Wanna start a band?”


End file.
